As commander of the Joint Special Operations
Task Force, the Task Force that undertook the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq
(AQI), General Stanley McChrystal saw his forces in 2006 increase the number of
raids against the enemy from ten to three hundred per month, with only minor
increments in personnel or funding. The raids were not only more numerous but
more successful. This activity led to locating and eliminating the top Al
Qaeda leader in Iraq, AbuMusab al-Zarqawi. The story of this accomplishment and
transformation of the Task Force from a superb organization for the 20th Century
into a superb organization for the 21st Century is told by the author in this
brilliantly written book.

The main components of
this radical change in the organization were both anatomical, how the Task
Force came to be structured, and physiological, the way the organization
changed its culture and behavior. The leader of the organization went, in
McChrystal’s words, from “puppet master to empathetic crafter of culture.”

This is a book on
‘Strategic Management,’ the art of creating and maintaining a competitive
advantage over the adversary in war, in the corporate world or just in day to
day life. Throughout the years many books have been written on strategy and
many different names assigned to the manner in which each author definestheir
method of creating competitive advantage. In describing the progression from
failure to success in his fight against AQI, General McChrystal exhibits the
quality that underlies all those methods: common sense.

The attitude of the leader

The author uses
abundant cases, as well as examples, derived from his own life experience to
define the path he followed as a leader of the team. What he learned about
leadership, he says, owed more to watching his mother tend her garden than to
West Point. She organized and maintained her patch and created an environment
in which the vegetables could grow. As Task Force commander, he says, he began
to view effective leadership as akin to gardening. Rather than following the
heroic model of leadership, he saw his role as creating and maintaining the
conditions in the Task Force for efficient work to flourish. He tended the
garden. He went from moving pieces on a board, as in “rule bound” chess, to
shaping the ecosystem – a complex network or interconnected system – in which
the team would operate and thrive. He sought to maintain a constant example and
message by means of very transparent behavior. “Thank you” became his most
important phrase, making a point of addressing every member of the team by his
first name.

Tending the garden is what the military call
“battlefield circulation,” the constant presence of the leader in all locations
and units. This was obtained by McChrystal by means of a daily Operational and
Intelligence Brief, O&I. When he assumed command in 2003 the O&I was a
“relatively small video teleconference,” involving a few participants.
McChrystal opened it up to full participation, not only within the Task Force
but also involving sister offices such as FBI and CIA, relevant embassies and
key Washington-based departments. This made possible for the organization to
attain what he terms a shared consciousness.
Such an opening increased the risks of leaks and of misinterpretation of
complex processes. He says, “anyone who wanted to beat us at bureaucratic
politics would have all the ammunition they needed but this was not the fight
we were focused on.”

“Shared Consciousness”
was one of the major attitudinal changes the Task Force commander instituted.
The other one was “Empowered Execution,”
a “radically decentralized system to push authority out to the edges of the
organization.” McChrystal soon realized that he was not the best person to take
all decisions but that decisions should be more properly taken by those closest
to the situation at hand. Discussing this new manner of leading, the author
makes use of military and aviation history. He describes how Admiral Horatio
Nelson empowered his captains to act on their own initiative and how he
cultivated the individual qualities of his subordinates as decision makers. His
unorthodox battle strategy battle at Trafalgar evidenced his trust in his
captains’ individual abilities, when he decided to attack the greater forces of
the enemy in a line perpendicular to their ships, rather than parallel to them,
as dictated by the traditional military strategy of the time. Such unorthodox
maneuver created confusion among the adversaries, rendered their visual
communications much more difficult and allowed his captains to act as
individual strategic units during the fight. Although, he was mortally wounded
at Trafalgar and much of the fight went on without his leadership, the French
Vice-Admiral Villeneuve said after the battle: “In the British Fleet off Cadiz
every captain was a Nelson.”

Anatomical transformations

In Iraq, the task of
removing Saddam Hussein from power was a relatively easy one. However, by the
fall of 2003 the fight had mutated into a confrontation against Sunnis led by a
Jordanian extremist called Abu Musab al Zarqawi. This presented the Task Force
with a new type of foe, not stronger than the Task Force, in military terms,
but operating in a totally different environment, one that could be described
as going from complicated to complex. It was, McChrystal says, not “a war of
planning and discipline but one of agility and innovation.” The units of the
enemy were self-contained and each operation was the brainchild of the men who
owned the mission.

McChrystal says that
the Task Force was the “best of the best” – a well-trained, superbly equipped,
well-communicated and disciplined, but they were losing the war against the
enemy. They were the best organization of the 20th Century facing an
organization designed for the 21st Century. AQI was a modern version of
Proteus, incessantly changing shape and faces with a speed the Task Force could
not match.

For this to change,
the Task Force went from an organizational closed configuration of silos to
open relationships across units that had been traditionally proud of their
uniqueness and had felt no need to share it with others. The Force had to swap
their “sturdy architecture for organic fluidity.” The author says they had to
“dissolve the barriers – the walls of our silos and the floors of our
hierarchies – to become a “team of teams.” Adaptability, more so than
efficiency, became the overriding priority. In explaining and justifying his
approach McChrystal uses several cases from other sectors, including the
medical world. He cites Dr. Kristina Talbert-Slagle saying that infections in
the human body, such as AIDS and insurgencies such as Al Qaeda’s, had similar
effects of weakening the host, be it the person or a society. He describes at
length the success of Roman legions, based on discipline and adherence to
strict rules and standardization, to conclude that this behavior no longer
worked in the current environment. The reductionist times of Frederick Winslow
Taylor’s “scientific management,” he says, were largely over. Taylor had
introduced the concept of efficiency in the manufacturing world but a new dimension
was now required: speed. By 2004, the Task Force realized Iraq presented a
different challenge where tactical flexibility was essential. Millenary lessons
about organizational structures and military procedure had to be set aside.

Physiological changes

A fascinating section
of McChrystal’s book deals with the increasing complexity of the environment,
where the Task Force had to act. Things were no longer complicated but became
complex. While an internal combustion engine is complicated, its function remains
predictable, if a component is changed. It works in a straightforward manner
and its changes are linear and do not spread to other machines. Complex systems
can experience non-linear change, even exponential in character. McChrystal
illustrates complexity with the so-called butterfly effect, described by Edward
Lorenz in his paper: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a
tornado in Texas?” A complex system, such as weather patterns or national
economies, is an interconnected array of components which interact incessantly
in a largely unpredictable manner.

While the success of the planning system of
the Task Force had been based on its ability to predict outcomes, Iraq’s
battlefield in 2004 looked more like a cold front than
the trajectory of a celestial body. Actions taken by AQI could lead to
country-wide civilian reactions that were difficult to anticipate. The strength
of the Task Force remained important but adaptability became even more so. It
was no longer enough, to use Peter Drucker’s maxim, to do things right but to
do the right thing.

McChrystal resorted to
networking. Rather than keeping the hierarchical top down rigid command
structure with walls separating the different divisions of the organization,
the Task Force went into a radical change from Command to Team. Using several
cases, such as the safe landing on the Hudson River of U.S. Airways flight
1549, the author explains why “instinctive, cooperative adaptability is
essential to high performing teams.” The actions taken by the crew of the
aircraft during this flight were typical of a team, not of a top down command
by Captain Chesley Sullenberger.

The Task Force
transformed from one single bureaucratic organization into multiple teams,
which trusted and communicated freely with each other. An organization can plan
but cannot possibly cover all the possibilities. They have to be able to adjust
to the unexpected with creative solutions. In a rapidly changing environment,
the plan is no longer the dominant factor, the team’s behavior is. Once members
of the team trust each member a superior synergy results, what the author calls
an “emergent intelligence,” which can perform without the plan.

The best strategy: candor

A change from a bureaucratic organization into
a flexible, agile “team of teams” was not the product of more manpower or more
money but the result of integration among the units of the organization, an
integration that was generated by the example of the leader and by his extreme
candor. By the force of his example everyone started to talk to each other:
operators, analysts, sister agencies. Up to then, the units had been operating
independently from each other while trying to keep pace with a complex
environment. There were horror stories about the indifference and jealousy of
agencies such as the FBI or the CIA. In the name of security they did not talk
to each other. In the new environment, every member of a team had to know every
other individual in order to build trust. Furthermore, the relationships
between teams had to resemble the relationship between individual members of
each team. SEALS had to trust the CIA and vice versa. What had to prevail was
not a spirit of competition but a spirit of cooperation. This had not been the
case before. The author affirms that up to the change “more than once in Iraq we were close to mounting capture/kill
operations only to learn at the last hour that the targets were working
undercover for another coalition entity.”

A textbook on ‘Strategic
Management’

This elegantly written
book is not only a brilliant memoir of General Stanley McChristal’s war against
Al Qaeda in Iraq but it also serves as a textbook on strategic management and
human relations. It can equally apply to our business world and to our life in
society. Its main theme is simple but powerful: share information freely and
empower those who are close to the problem to allow them to decide. If, as they
say, information is power, don’t keep it in the foot locker, share it freely
and see how this magnifies your own power, not through raw authority but
through gravitas.

I have always felt
that, at the root of successful management science, which is usually adorned
with high sounding and sophisticated terminology, are two rather simple but
powerful human qualities: candor and moral courage. I am glad to see these two
ingredients present in Team of Teams.

Gustavo Coronel, who served on
the board of directors of Petróleos de Venezuela (PdVSA), has had a long
and distinguished career in the international petroleum industry, including in
the USA, Europe, Venezuela and Indonesia. Mr. Coronel was also the
Venezuelan Representative of Transparency International, a Berlin-based
organization fighting corruption. He is an author, public policy expert and
contributor to SFPPR News & Analysis.

2 comentarios:

Thanks, Gustavo Coronel, for pointing to this excellent book by General Stanley McChrystal.Some of the text is freely available at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591847486?keywords=Team%20of%20Teams&qid=1445384795&ref_=nav_signin&sr=8-1